Weegee the Famous, the Voyeur and Exhibitionist

The street photographer turned gritty, grisly New York scenes into art.
The secret of Weegee8217s photography was his ability to operate as both the giver and the getter of attention.
The secret of Weegee’s photography was his ability to operate as both the giver and the getter of attention.Photograph from ICP / Getty

Photography, at its mid-nineteenth-century beginning, muscled in on painting one precinct at a time. Portraiture, of a solemn, straight-on sort, suggested itself immediately. Its hold-still composition, simple and traditional, met a mechanical necessity of the new art: early studio photographers, at the mercy of long-duration exposure, often steadied the backs of their subjects’ heads with clamps unseen by camera or viewer. Landscapes held still on their own if the wind didn’t blow, so Gustave Le Gray could become an automated Poussin, while Mathew Brady strained to click his way past Gilbert Stuart. History painting—crowded, violent, declamatory—had to postpone its photographic update until smaller cameras made picture-taking portable and fleet. But genre painting, with its casual assemblages of ordinary life, stood ready early on to be appropriated by the new medium.

In “Bystander” (Laurence King), a newly updated history of street photography, Colin Westerbeck and Joel Meyerowitz point out the genre’s early inclination toward “humble people as subjects.” Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard’s “Photographic Album for the Artist and the Amateur” (1851) and John Thomson’s “Street Life in London” (1877) put images of chimney sweeps and millers in front of well-off viewers who could regard them with curiosity and concern: “Unlettered, uncomplicated people were felt to preserve an otherwise lost capacity for sincerity for which modern artists and intellectuals yearned.” Early in the twentieth century, as photography’s documentary capacities turned reformist in the hands of Jacob Riis and Paul Strand, it was still, as Riis’s famous title showed, a matter of “the other half” being viewed by those perched far above.

Only when tabloid newspapers went into mass circulation after the First World War, Westerbeck and Meyerowitz argue, did those “humble people” become the audience as well as the subject matter. More than anyone else, it was Arthur Fellig, self-insistently known as Weegee the Famous, whose “photographs of the poor were made—at least, originally—for the poor themselves.” The New Yorkers Weegee photographed—especially those caught up in sudden calamities of crime and fire—obtained a kind of fame that lasted not fifteen minutes but more like fifteen hours, until the next morning’s edition swept away the previous afternoon’s.

“Shirtless Officers” (1941).Photograph by Weegee / ICP / Getty

For decades, Weegee has been collected as art, thus restoring some of the original other-half dynamic between viewer and image. Coffee-table books of his work abound: “Unknown Weegee” (2006), produced for an exhibition at the International Center of Photography, is the least hefty and best arranged; “Weegee’s New York: Photographs 1935-1960” (1982) is the grittiest. These have recently been joined by “Extra! Weegee!” (Hirmer), which contains nearly four hundred photographs, alongside the original, often exuberant, captions affixed by Acme Newspictures, the agency through which Weegee sold them. But there has been no complete biography of the photographer. Now Christopher Bonanos’s “Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous” (Holt) has displaced a host of fragmentary recollections and the loudmouthed, unreliable memoir, “Weegee by Weegee,” published in 1961.

Usher Fellig was born into a family of Galician Jews in 1899. He became Arthur sometime after arriving on the Lower East Side, ten years later. According to Bonanos, his “sense of family” was so “minimal” that he miscounted his own siblings in that memoir. The Felligs joined the tenement dwellers who would soon constitute much of Arthur’s subject matter.

His coup de foudre came, he later recalled, before he left school, in the seventh grade: “I had had my picture taken by a street tintype photographer, and had been fascinated by the result. I think I was what you might call a ‘natural-born’ photographer, with hypo—the chemicals used in the darkroom—in my blood.” He acquired a mail-order tintype-making kit, and later got himself hired, at fifteen, to take pictures for insurance companies and mail-order catalogues. He bought a pony on which to pose street urchins whose parents were willing to pay for images that made their offspring look like little grandees. (The pony, which he named Hypo, ate too much and was repossessed.) During the early nineteen-twenties, Fellig worked in the darkrooms of the Times and Acme Newspictures, sleeping in the Acme offices when he couldn’t make his rent. He kept the agency’s photographers ahead of the competition by learning to develop pictures on the subway, just after they’d been shot. By 1925, Acme was letting him take photographs, albeit uncredited, of his own.

Bonanos describes the Speed Graphic camera—even now, still part of the Daily News logo—as being “tough as anything, built mostly from machined aluminum and steel.” It was the only press credential Fellig needed at murders and fires, where, after leaving Acme, in 1934, he continued to show up with a manic freelancing zeal. A couple of years later, he was living in a room at 5 Centre Market Place, with no hot water but with a handful of books, among them “Live Alone and Like It” and “The Sex Life of the Unmarried Adult.” He decorated the place with his own published photographs—“like taxidermied heads on a hunter’s wall,” as Bonanos puts it. He got to the nighttime action so fast that he developed (and encouraged) a reputation for being psychic. Bonanos shows that Weegee’s success had more to do with persistence than with telepathy; a bell connected the photographer’s room to the Fire Department’s alarms, and he got permission to install a police radio in his ’38 Chevrolet. However much Weegee wanted people to believe that his professional moniker came from being recognized as a human Ouija board, it in fact derived from his early drudgery as a squeegee boy—a dryer of just developed prints—in the Times’ darkroom.

Bonanos, the city editor of New York magazine, stacks up the “nine dailies” that chronicled the metropolis between the two World Wars. The Times was “prim about bloodshed, more interested in Berlin than in Bensonhurst,” and the Herald-Tribune wanted photographers to show up for assignments wearing ties. Neither employed Weegee regularly, and although the tabloids ran on visuals, his real bread and butter came from the afternoon broadsheets, especially the Post, then full-sized and liberal but just as “lousy at making money” as it is today. The World-Telegram was the first to give Weegee the individual credit lines he was soon commanding from everyone else. Bonanos resurrects the inky roar of this world with a fine, nervy lip: Weegee’s murder pictures broke through not because of their “binary quality of life and death” or their “technical felicity . . . with angles and shadow play” but mostly because their sprawled, bleeding, well-hatted and finely shod gangsters made them “more fun” than all the others.

“Their First Murder” (1941).Photograph by Weegee / ICP / Getty

Bonanos also proves himself resourceful, tracking down a rubbernecking seven-year-old whom Weegee photographed after a murder in 1939, as well as a toddler who appeared in a Coney Island crowd scene the following year. Readers will want to keep their Weegee collections on the coffee table; Bonanos describes more pictures than his publisher could reasonably reproduce, even in a book that occasionally becomes relentless and replete, like a contact sheet instead of a selected print. But Weegee and his world don’t encourage minimalism, and, fifty years after his death, he has at last acquired a biographer who can keep up with him.

Weegee’s frantic pace was a matter of economic and temperamental need. No matter how fast he might be on his feet, the job required a lot of waiting around between catastrophes, and car-wreck pictures paid only two dollars and fifty cents apiece. “Naked City,” Weegee’s immortally titled first book of photographs, published in 1945, reproduces a Time Inc. check stub that records a thirty-five-dollar payment for “two murders.” Bonanos captured the variation and the intensity of it all in a “tally of unrest” from April, 1937. Over three days, New York provided Weegee with a felonious repast: a hammer murder, an arson fire, a truck accident, a brawl by followers of Harlem’s Father Divine, and the booking of a young female embezzler.

During the forties, the short-lived, liberal, and picture-laden PM, which Bonanos sizes up as an “inconsistent and often late-to-the story but pretty good newspaper,” put Weegee on retainer and made his pictures pop, bringing out their details and sharpening their lines through “an innovative process involving heated ink and chilled paper.” His first exhibition, in 1941, at the Photo League’s gallery, on East Twenty-first Street, garnered good reviews. Its title, “Murder Is My Business,” was a noirish bit of self-advertisement destined to be overtaken by events: thanks to rackets-busting and a male-draining World War, New York was headed for a prolonged plunge in the rate of local killings.

“Showgirl Backstage” (circa 1950).Photograph by Weegee / ICP / Getty

Weegee liked being known as “the official photographer for Murder Inc.,” but his gangland pictures lack the pity and fear—as well as concupiscence—that his camera extracted from people committing crimes of passion and sheer stupidity. In the summer of 1936, he made a splash with photographs of the teen-age Gladys MacKnight and her boyfriend after their arrest for the hatchet murder of Gladys’s disapproving mother. In one of the pictures, the adolescent couple look calm and a little sullen, as if they’d been grounded, not booked for capital murder. Weegee displays a discernible compassion toward the panicked chagrin of Robert Joyce, a Dodgers lover who shot and killed two Giants fans when he was loaded with eighteen beers; his face reaches us through Weegee’s lens as he’s sobering up, beside a policeman, his eyes wide with the realization of what he’s done. Weegee never got his wish to shoot a murder as it was happening, but his real gift was for photographing targets after they’d ripened into corpses. He “often remarked,” Bonanos notes, “that he took pains to make the dead look like they were just taking a little nap.”

Weegee’s pictures are full of actual sleepers—along with those coöperatively feigning slumber for the camera—in bars and doorways, atop benches and cardboard boxes, in limousines and toilet stalls, at Bowery missions or backstage. He became to shut-eye what Edward Weston was to peppers and Philippe Halsman would be to jumping. Even his photographs of mannequins, another frequent subject, seem to evince a fascination with, and perhaps a yearning for, rest. The dummies don’t so much appear inanimate as etherized, ready to rejoin the urban rat race once they’ve gotten forty winks.

The voyeur was also an exhibitionist. Weegee sometimes surrendered his camera so that he could inhabit a shot instead of creating it. That’s him next to an open trunk with a corpse, and there he is dressed as a clown, photographing from a ring of the circus. In 1937, Life commissioned him to do a photo-essay about a police station’s booking process. He turned it into a feature about a crime photographer: him. His grandiosity grew with the years, despite, or because of, his self-diagnosed “great inferiority complex.” He took credit for helping to make Fiorello LaGuardia famous (never mind that LaGuardia was already mayor), and wrote in his memoir that he and the gossip columnist Walter Winchell “had a lot of fun together, chasing stories in the night.” The index to Neal Gabler’s stout biography of Winchell yields no mention of Weegee.

“Life Saving” (1940).Photograph by Weegee / ICP / Getty

In his début show, at the Photo League, Weegee exhibited a supremely affecting picture of a mother and daughter weeping for two family members who are trapped inside a burning tenement, and titled it “Roast.” A few years later, for “Naked City,” the book of photographs that forever secured his reputation, Weegee renamed the image “I Cried When I Took This Picture.” Cynthia Young, a curator at the I.C.P., has written that the retitled photograph became “a new kind of self-portrait, making the photographer part of the subject of the picture,” though she points out that some of the Photo League’s left-leaning members had disliked the original label. Did Weegee really cry? Colin Westerbeck once commented, “No, Weegee, you didn’t. You took that picture instead of crying.” The truth about the retitling lies not somewhere in between but at both poles. The man who once said, “My idea was to make the camera human,” experienced emotion at the fire; then crafted a sick joke about it; then, later still, realized that the image would go over better with sobs than with smart-assedness. Take away the question of intention and the picture one is left with remains, indisputably, a moment cut from life with a tender shiv.

The secret of Weegee’s photography—and the M.O. of his coarse life—was an ability to operate as both the giver and the getter of attention. Weegee didn’t learn to drive until the mid-nineteen-thirties, and before getting his license he relied on a teen-age driver, who took him not only to breaking news but also to his favorite brothel, in the West Seventies. The madam there, named May, “had peepholes in the wall,” and she and Weegee would watch the boy chauffeur perform in the next room. Weegee excised this last detail from the manuscript of his memoir, but merely to save the driver from embarrassment. In the early forties, he carried his infrared camera into dark movie theatres to photograph couples who were necking, and then sold the credited images. He also took some remarkable pictures of people in drag under arrest. In these images, the voyeur in Weegee seems overwhelmed by a respectful solidarity with his subjects’ defiant display. In his memoir, he writes about getting “a telegram from a men’s magazine; they wanted pictures of abnormal fellows who liked to dress in women’s clothes. I would call that editor and tell him that what was abnormal to him was normal to me.”

“Unusual Crime” (circa 1940).Photograph by Weegee / ICP / Getty

Weegee liked to say that he was looking for “a girl with a healthy body and a sick mind.” The two most important women in his history were unlikely candidates for extended involvement. Throughout the early and mid-nineteen-forties, Wilma Wilcox, a South Dakotan studying for a master’s in social work at Columbia, provided Weegee with the non-clingy company he preferred; what Bonanos calls “her mix of social-worker patience and prairie sturdiness” allowed her to survive his “erratic affection.” In 1947, he married a woman named Margaret Atwood, a prosperous widow whom he had met at a book signing for “Weegee’s People,” a follow-up to “Naked City.” The marriage lasted a few years. Weegee pawned his wedding ring in lieu of getting a divorce.

The voyeur-exhibitionist dynamic reached its peak when Weegee was, in Bonanos’s phrase, “watching the watchers”—an interest that grew over time. His pictures of people observing crime, accident, and even happy spectacle extended what Westerbeck and Meyerowitz see as street photography’s long tradition of memorializing the crowd instead of the parade. In 2007, the New York State Supreme Court affirmed the street photographer’s right to take pictures of people in public, something that had never much worried Weegee. “Poor people are not fussy about privacy,” he declared. “They have other problems.”

Weegee made three of his greatest views of viewers between 1939 and 1941. The first of them shows people neatly arranged in the windows of a Prince Street apartment building, looking out into the night as cheerfully as if they’d just been revealed from behind the little paper flaps of an Advent calendar. Below them, in the doorway of a café, is what’s brought them to the windows: a corpse claimed by the Mob and a handful of well-dressed police detectives. “Balcony Seats at a Murder” ran in Life, portraying harmless, guilt-free excitement, a carnival inversion of what a generation later might have been recorded at Kitty Genovese’s murder.

In the summer of 1940, Weegee captured a cluster of beachgoers observing an effort to resuscitate a drowned swimmer. The focus of the picture is a pretty young woman, the person most preoccupied with the camera, the only one giving it a big smile. She doesn’t disgust the viewer; she pleases, with her longing to be noticed, and her delighted realization that she, at least, is breathing. She’s the life force, in all its wicked gaiety.

“Dr. Eliot, would you let the dog out?”

The following year, Weegee made the best of his gawker studies, a picture prompted by what Bonanos identifies as “a small-time murder at the corner of North Sixth and Roebling Streets,” in Williamsburg. In it, more than a dozen people, most of them children, exhibit everything from fright to squealing relish. “Extra! Weegee!” reveals that the Acme caption for this kinetic tableau was “Who Said People Are All Alike?,” which Weegee, with his taste for the body blow, changed to “Their First Murder.” The killing that’s taken place is merely the big bang; the faces, each a vivid record of the ripple effects of crime, become the real drama.

“I have no time for messages in my pictures. That’s for Western Union,” Weegee said, swiping Samuel Goldwyn’s line. But once in a while he made a photograph with clear political intent, such as the one of Joe McWilliams, a fascistic 1940 congressional candidate shown looking at, and like, a horse’s ass. There’s also the image of a black mother holding a small child behind the shattered glass of their front door, smashed by toughs who didn’t want them moving into Washington Heights. Most deliberately, Weegee made a series of car-wreck pictures at a spot on the Henry Hudson Parkway where the off-ramp badly needed some fencing; he was proud that their publication helped get a barrier installed.

In a foreword to “Naked City,” William McCleery, a PM editor, detected a crusading impulse in Weegee’s picture of poor children escaping a New York heat wave: “You don’t want those kids to go on sleeping on that fire escape forever, do you?” Bonanos, too, thinks this photograph was made and received with indignation, but the image has always been more picturesque than disturbing. (Weegee almost certainly posed the children and told them to keep their eyes shut.) Still, Weegee often exhibited an immigrant’s pride—Bonanos calls him a “proud Jew”—that can be seen as broadly political. One looks at the pictures he made in Chinatown and Little Italy toward the end of the war, full of American flags and patriotic embraces, and senses his appreciation of the eclectic energies at play in the city, along with a feeling that the old tenement world was ready to take a fine leap toward something better.

“As the World Series of 1943 Got Under Way” (1943).Photograph by Weegee / ICP / Getty
“Girl at the Circus” (circa nineteen-forties to nineteen-fifties).Photograph by Weegee / ICP / Getty
“They’re Looking Up at the Empire State” (1945).Photograph by Weegee / ICP / Getty

Even when not explicitly activist, Weegee’s stance remains compassionate. Down on the Bowery, Sammy’s—a self-conscious dive frequented by boozehounds, talentless belters, a dwarf mascot, and uptown slummers—was the place Weegee chose for his book parties, somewhere he could both gape and show off. The bar was itself a contrivance, a kind of nightly photo op, but the pictures Weegee took there manage to be both exploitative and humane.

How literally true, and how staged, was Weegee’s work? In “Bystander,” Westerbeck and Meyerowitz show that early street photographers tried “to bully or finagle their subjects into behaving naturally.” This fundamental tension between a composed pictorialism and a trouvé “snapshot aesthetic” persisted in photography decade after decade. Alfred Stieglitz, as if trying to negotiate a compromise, would sometimes frame a setup and wait for passersby to wander into it; Brassaï orchestrated his photographs; on occasion Ben Shahn included his wife as a “fake subject” among real ones.

Bonanos admits that Weegee would sometimes “give the truth some extra help,” and when it comes to what he calls “minor adjustments” the biographer doesn’t mount an especially high horse. Still, he doesn’t hide the whoppers that amount to fake views. On November 22, 1943, Weegee’s most egregious cheating produced his most famous picture, “The Critic”: a scraggly, impoverished woman looks scornfully at a pair of fur-clad, tiara-wearing ladies arriving at the opera. The ladies are actually behaving more naturally than the down-on-her-luck observer, a woman Weegee found at Sammy’s and plied with drink before taking her uptown to complete his scheme. When he republished his opera photographs a couple of years later, his printed commentary gave no hint of the deception.

“Fireman Rescues Torahs” (mid-nineteen-forties).Photograph by Weegee / ICP / Getty

There were plenty of occasions when circumstances arranged themselves without need of manipulation—ones Weegee recognized for their unlikely, organic beauty, and took pains to capture before they could disappear from his viewfinder. “Extra! Weegee!” reproduces his photograph of a church fire on West 122nd Street, where the water arcs made by several fire hoses appear to be flying buttresses, permanent parts of the structure they’ve just come to save. In a nighttime picture, a thin man near a lamppost looks like one of Giacometti’s elongated sculptures. A shot through the open doors of a paddy wagon reveals two men on opposite sides of the van’s spare tire, covering their faces with hats; the result is a comic mystery and a sort of Mickey Mouse silhouette, in which their hats look like ears.

This attraction to the bizarre suggests Weegee as a precursor to photographers like Diane Arbus. In “On Photography” (1977), Susan Sontag acknowledges that Arbus once referred to Weegee as “the photographer she felt closest to,” but she rejected any connection between the two beyond a shared urban sensibility:

The similarity between [Weegee’s] work and Arbus’ ends there. However eager she was to disavow standard elements of photographic sophistication such as composition, Arbus was not unsophisticated. And there is nothing journalistic about her motives for taking pictures. What may seem journalistic, even sensational, in Arbus’ photographs places them, rather, in the main tradition of Surrealist art.

And yet one can hardly discount or fail to notice the Surrealist essence of Weegee’s paddy-wagon picture. The mask-like fedora might as well be Magritte’s apple. Weegee knew Surrealism when he saw it, and the recognition came from an artistic instinct for provocative juxtaposition. A circus-audience picture from 1943 shows two deadpan, hatted women holding hatted monkey dolls in their laps—an image that points straight ahead to Arbus’s work.

“Couple at the Palace Theatre” (circa 1943).Photograph by Weegee / ICP / Getty
“I Cried When I Took This Picture” (1939).Photograph by Weegee / ICP / Getty

The publication of “Naked City,” in 1945, brought public praise from Langston Hughes and a congratulatory note from Alfred Stieglitz: “My laurel wreath I hand to thee.” If there were critics who remained skeptical of photography’s status as art, there were now plenty of them ready to usher this night-crawling creature of newsprint into the pantheon. (Several Weegees had been exhibited in two MOMA shows in 1943 and 1944.) Weegee did not grow rich, but he craved fame more than money, and he had enough of the former to appear in advertising endorsements for camera equipment.

By the time all this acclaim was upon him, Weegee had more or less finished doing his most interesting work. He did shoot a girl being launched out of a cannon, but he was not made for the space age, let alone the era of urban renewal. Vogue’s art director, Alexander Liberman, brought him to the magazine for a time, but not much came of that, and the bits of advertising and commercial photography that he undertook don’t engage us now any more than they did him at the time.

“Making a Drink” (circa nineteen-forties).Photograph by Weegee / ICP / Getty

It was a mistake for Weegee to enter the well-lit, corporate world. His power had always come from making night into day. With flashbulbs, and even their riskier, flash-powder antecedent, he was able to own and preserve the instant when—Fiat lux!—he spun the world a hundred and eighty degrees. For a split second, the immigrant scrapper could be God, or, at least, Lucifer. Actual daytime represented exile, a demotion.

The itch to remain Weegee the Famous took him to Hollywood. Mark Hellinger, the columnist turned producer, seeking a sexy name for a detective movie, had bought the rights to the title “Naked City,” and shot the film in New York. This was a little like Cecil B. DeMille’s office wanting Norma Desmond’s car instead of Norma Desmond, but the experience of being around the production impelled Weegee, in 1948, to shift coasts, where he wasted a few years chasing bit parts in films. The only significant work from this period was a series of nighttime promotional photographs taken across the country for a 1950 Universal movie, “The Sleeping City.”

“The Critic” (1943).Photograph by Weegee / ICP / Getty

Weegee was back in New York by the end of 1951, and spent much of the next decade making pointless forays into Europe, art-house films, and soft porn. He photographed the members of camera clubs ogling Bettie Page, the pinup queen, and sought connection with a younger artistic crowd in Greenwich Village. He once invited Judith Malina, the co-founder of the Living Theatre, home, then chased her around his apartment. She recalled Weegee for Bonanos shortly before her death: “He wanted to see the soul of the person. He wanted to see the essence of the person. And he certainly wanted to see the tits of the person.”

Throughout his last years, Weegee devoted a baffling amount of time to “distortions,” fun-house caricatures of celebrities like Salvador Dali and Marilyn Monroe. They’re interesting for a second or two, but the car wrecks he’d photographed years before—pulverized and accordioned vehicles—were more authentically, captivatingly warped. What he considered a late creative stretch was actually shrinkage; toward the end, he ceased making many distinctions between art and junk. To slow the drift, he tried old tricks, at one point even buying another pony—a replacement for the long-dead Hypo. An attempted return to nighttime news photography proved beyond his physical energies.

“Couple in Voodoo Trance” (circa 1956).Photograph by Weegee / ICP / Getty

Amid the tiresome braggadocio of Weegee’s memoir, one finds no mention of either Margaret Atwood or Wilma Wilcox, but the latter made a god-sent return to Weegee at the end of his life. Decades earlier, Wilcox had been shocked by his storage methods—“photographs not in files but tossed into a pork barrel.” In 1964, with money from her pension, she purchased a brownstone on West Forty-seventh Street, and allowed Weegee, and his œuvre, to move in.

He died from a brain tumor at Christmastime in 1968, and Wilcox, “the silent hero of Weegee’s story,” according to Bonanos, set about organizing the wild clutter of his superabundant, uneven work. She lived until 1993, perhaps with a premonition of the photographic age now upon us, an era in which that smiling girl on the beach has no need of a press photographer to get herself noticed; she comes to us through her Instagram feed, as a selfie from which the drowning man has probably been cropped. Defying one of Weegee’s dicta—“A picture is like a blintz. Eat it while it’s hot”—Wilcox succeeded in getting his messy life’s achievement into the International Center of Photography, which today holds it in “about five hundred big gray archival boxes kept cool and dry.” ♦